In the flowering of Hungarian fiction in the late 1970s that parodied and undermined narrative authority - in communist terms, the authority of the state - Pöter Esterházy was one of the most energetic players. He raised authorial elusiveness to a fine art and developed a bag of tricks that included clowning digressions, contradictions and outright borrowings. Celestial Harmonies, the frankly vast account of his family, is in some respects a perfectly natural outcome of this career. What could be more logical than for him, in his maturity, to turn his attention to his own Esterházy line, a genealogy of endless digressions? Esterházys have been warriors, counts, diplomats, politicians, churchmen and patrons for 10 centuries.

There are other themes to Celestial Harmonies, questions of homeland, dictatorship, history and how to face it, but Esterházy's overwhelming business here is with his father. His book is in two parts - apparently so discrete that the economical reader might congratulate him or herself on having bought two 300-page novels for the price of one. Book One, "Numbered Sentences from the Lives of the Esterházy Family", flows out in trademark Esterházy vein, telling, inventing, justifying, fantasising about "my father". This father is plural, encompassing all the narrator's fathers, back to the dynasty's beginnings - pro-Habsburg and anti-Habsburg, the one who acquired his estates by uxoricide, another who betrayed Prince Rákóczi, another who became Bishop of Eger, or a member of the 1848 government, had sex with the kitchen maid, or farted before Catherine the Great ("The wise czarina nodded: an honest sound at last"). The sentences spin out, some over several pages, a millrace of anecdotes that is only occasionally tiring. One phrase - "Which is how my father met my mother" - triggers dozens of anecdotes. Esterházy's always flickering lightness and humour easily turns such tropes into punchlines.

In Book One he is visibly clearing the decks. "My father's son does not want to write about my father," he concludes sulkily, bringing us, in his indirect way, into the presence of the narrator's biological father in what promises to be a straightforward first-person narrative of a childhood lived under communism. "Fear and communists, everything here begins with them, and will end with them too, it seems." But Book Two, like Tristram Shandy, has a more metaphorical character than most autobiography. The family's loss of everything but its inventory, its branding as intellectuals and class enemies, and the fate of Mátyás Esterházy, the father, sent to work as a farm labourer, create another river of anecdotes in which most currents of the 20th century can be discerned - a century startlingly well foreshadowed in the words of Péter's grandfather: "People quickly grow tired of the good, look for something better, find something worse, then insist on it ever after for fear of something still worse to come." There is no deliverance, but there is "the persistent and enigmatic laughter" of the Esterházys.

There are probably many Esterházy readers who, ever since the postmodern tribulations offered by, for example, his novels A Little Hungarian Pornography and She Loves Me , have hoped he might abandon his I-say-I-say-I-say routine of self-conscious narration and write a conventional, linear novel. But existence in central Europe has not been linear for a century - history delivering life to its citizens only in fragments - and Esterházy's prose reflects that. He is not, in fact, a very wild innovator, many of his techniques being clearly affiliated to the now avuncular-looking creations of Joyce and Beckett, but, enlivened by a joyful spirit, his writing seems both historically aware and insouciantly laid out: it has the dynastic eclecticism you might find in the furnishings of an Esterházy palace.

My one reluctant complaint is that there is too much of it. (No, I have another: the translation never saw an editor's hand, leaving a steady drip of solecisms - "a bum wrap" being my favourite.) Giantism is the successful novelist's halitosis - your closest friend won't tell you. But it is time someone in Esterházy's inner circle wrestled him down about it. He has said that the Hungarian sentence is naturally long, and "such sentences totter along, uncertain even of themselves, stammer a little, in short, are extremely loveable". But even in a novel that creates such an expansive, deeply coloured, visionary picture, there's no standing back and contemplating. They still have to be read, left to right.

· Julian Evans wrote The Romantic Road, a BBC radio series on the European novel